A Philosophical Botany

In Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany Matthew Hall’s argument doesn’t strike me as provocative, but for others grounded in anthropocentrism, zoocentrism, Cartesian dualities, and very out-of-date biological understanding, it may.

As fellow eukaryotes, plants and animals (and fungi) all share nucleated cells as our foundational organizational structure. Even more fundamentally: there would not be life on earth as we know it without plants expelling oxygen as waste. They are the primary converters of solar energy into life, without which we would not exist. Eating plants, or eating the things that eat plants, we are completely dependent on plants. Yet we certainly do not give plants the respect and care we should. Quite the opposite, in fact. The thingness of plants makes them easy to dismiss, uproot, poison, pave-over, manipulate, and above all, disregard.

Hall discusses the roots of the lordly disregard of plants in Western thought (the Judeo-Christian-Aristotlian nexus); alternatives in other worldly traditions (Hindu, Jain, Buddhist); and older approaches (animist, pagan, Indigenous). Then, detailing recent discoveries of kinds of sentience and mentality in plants, he’s off to the races. A blurb on the back makes the inevitable allusion to Peter Singer’s groundbreaking Animal Liberation. So what about plant liberation?